Free & paid equity research software: The complete list

Kris Bennatti, CEO of Hudson Labs

November 5, 2024

A comprehensive list of the best tools and resources for investment research.

The best software for stock research for both institutional and individual investors, all in one place. Customers, investors and friends often ask us about the best available tools and resources. We created this list to help make good software more “findable”. The list is updated annually.

Full service market intelligence platforms a.k.a Bloomberg alternatives

The following tools provide access to financial and market data, stock screening, SEC filings, earnings call transcripts and financial news all in all-in-one place.

Free and freemium alternatives to a Bloomberg terminal

Hudson Labs - Hudson Labs is a web-based investment research platform including AI-driven fundamental research, systematic forensic analysis, and the Hudson Labs Co-Analyst. We provide detailed financial data, valuation multiples, and growth metrics, offering accurate data on 5,500+ US stocks powered by S&P Global. You can also get the full picture of your coverage's health with an integrated analysis of financial data and our proprietary risk signals. Hudson Labs is the only supplier of real-time data on bankruptcy concerns, material control weaknesses, customer concentration, forensic risk score, and more.

CapEdge - We love CapEdge (formerly Docoh). The tool has financial data, stock screening, SEC filing search, earnings call transcripts, market news, stock alerts and charting. It’s all free and has a great user interface.

TIKR - TIKR provides financial tools like a stock screener, financial statements analysis, stock valuation metrics, ratios, charts, news, and filings.

Koyfin - Koyfin is similar to TIKR in many ways. It provides market data, filings, news, charting etc.

And more....
Complete list: Free and low cost alternatives to Bloomberg.

Market data & fundamental analysis

Hudson Labs - Our platform has detailed financial data, valuation multiples, and growth metrics, offering accurate data on 5,500+ US stocks powered by S&P Global. We also support fundamental research with our AI-generated background memo and earnings call summary, in addition to our proprietary risk signals.

Yahoo Finance - Yahoo Finance is a classic. It provides free real-time and historical stock quotes and charting, news etc.

ROIC - ROIC provides 30 years of financial data and news feed on 7,000 companies. ROIC has a free plan, and three paid plans at $25, $40, and $599 per month.

iBorrowDesk - iBorrow Desk is a tool for monitoring borrow rates and availability using Interactive Broker's freely available data.

Short Squeeze - ShortSqueeze provides short interest data and related services.

Most tools under “Full service research tools” also have market and financial data.

Forensic resources for finding and avoiding fraud

Make better investing decisions with these free and paid tools that help you identify fraud.

Paid investing software for identifying fraud and fraudsters

Hudson Labs - Hudson Labs provides machine-learned forensic risk assessment tools and advanced SEC filing navigation. We use artificial intelligence to read financial text and assess its importance. Our flagship product, Hudson Labs Market Intelligence, is a real-time investment research platform.

Check out our blog for more case studies and examples. Find Research and White Papers here .

InsiderScore - InsiderScore provides insider trading, institutional ownership and stock buyback information and other data/analytics services.

Disclosure Insight/Probes Reporter - Probes provides alerts on undisclosed SEC probes and analysis of disclosed investigations. They make 2,500 FOIA requests and hundreds of appeals each year.

Free & freemium forensic investigation resources

ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) - Offshore Leaks Database - ICIJ runs a searchable public database of offshore leaks so you can check mentions in the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Bahamas Leaks, and more.

Good Jobs First’s Violation Tracker - The Violation Tracker combines enforcement data obtained from more than 200 federal, state, and local regulatory agencies - with a company lookup and search tool.

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronics Records) - Pacer provides free/low-cost access to case information. Technically they charge $0.10 per page, but they’ll waive fees for anyone incurring less than $30 per quarter (300 pages).

And more....
Complete list: "Forensic stock research resources for finding and avoiding fraud"

Insider trading & institutional ownership monitoring tools

These free and paid tools help you track when insiders trade and/or what stocks institutions are buying and selling.

Paid insider tracking tools

InsiderScore (Verity) - InsiderScore provides high-quality, human-reviewed data on insider transactions.

And more....

Explore free tools for insider trading and institutional buying selling Complete list: The best insider trading tracking tools.

Expert call aggregators

Many investors rely on expert calls to better understand what’s really going on under the hood at public companies.

Tegus (AlphaSense) - The Tegus database is a smart-searchable platform of peer-led expert call transcripts by investors for investors. Tegus now comes bundled with BamSEC.

Stream (AlphaSense) - Stream is a library of transcripts and one-on-one calls with former executives, customers, competitors, and channel participants.

Want to track and summarize earnings calls? Check out our previous blog post.

SEC filing search & navigation tools

The following tools facilitate search and navigation of SEC filings, earnings transcripts, corporate disclosures and textual financial information.

Hudson Labs - Hudson Labs provides machine-learned forensic risk assessment tools and advanced SEC filing navigation. We use artificial intelligence to read financial text and assess its importance. Our flagship product, Hudson Labs Market Intelligence, is a real-time investment research platform.

Check out our blog for more case studies and examples. Find Research and White Papers here .

AlphaSense - AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform focused on “smart search”. AlphaSense facilitates search of filings, transcripts, news and equity research.

Sentieo (AlphaSense) - Sentieo provides smart search for filings and other market information as well as table extraction and transcript analysis.

DisclosureNet (Certent) - DisclosureNet facilitates filings search for U.S. and Canadian filings.

inFilings (Verity) - inFilings specializes in SEC filings, investment ideas generation, and data mining services.

And more....

Complete list, including free and low cost tools: The best SEC filing navigation tools

SEC correspondence

The SEC’s Corporate Finance Division frequently sends letters asking for clarification on or requiring changes to a company’s disclosure. This correspondence between the company and the SEC is eventually made public on EDGAR.

Free

EDGAR - SEC correspondence can be found via a company’s EDGAR page. Look for “UPLOAD” and “CORRESP” filing types.

Paid

Hudson Labs - Hudson Labs provides a unique service whereby SEC comment letter information is extracted from the PDF and presented in an easily readable format, allowing users to identify interesting commentary without downloading PDFs. Unlike EDGAR, Hudson Labs sorts SEC comment letters by the date the correspondence was made public instead of the original filing date. Every week, we highlight SEC Commentary to our users that often leads to price-moving changes in related party disclosure, KPI reporting, corrective statements, and more. Users can also receive daily alerts on SEC Comment Letters alongside other risk feeds.

SEC correspondence can also be accessed through a Bloomberg Terminal and other full-service research tools.

Equity research and financial news aggregators and online communities

These tools help bring together equity research, analysis and news in one place.

Commonstock - Commonstock is an online investing community that amplifies insights from top investors, backed by the performance and portfolio in their linked brokerage accounts.

Seeking Alpha - Seeking Alpha is a large online investing community. Professional and amateur investors and analysts share new investing ideas, discuss the latest news, debate the merits of stocks etc.

And more....

Complete list, including free and low cost tools: Best investment research aggregators

Financial APIs

Do you prefer to take an algorithmic approach to trading or investing? The following APIs provide market, macro, and fundamental data, as well as select alternative data.

Nasdaq Data Link (formerly Quandl) - Quandl provides great APIs for a wide variety of data products, including traditional and alternative data sources.

SEC API - SEC API allows you to query the SEC filings corpus in real-time, download filings, access historical metadata etc. EDGAR is no longer very “scrapable” so you can’t replicate the SEC API on your own. SEC API is not affiliated with the Securities Exchange Commission.

And more....

Complete list, including free and low cost tools: Top 13 financial APIs that will actually help you invest

Quant platforms

QuantRocket - QuantRocket is a Python-based platform for developing automated quantitative trading strategies. It provides data collection tools, a research environment, multiple backtesters, and live and paper trading through Interactive Brokers (IB).

OpenBB - OpenBB facilitates forecasting and more with built-in Python notebooks.

We’re still working on this list….DM us your favourites!

Artificial Intelligence, NLP and Machine Learning

Find our list, including free and low-cost tools here: Top AI Tools for Equity Research

Do you know of an awesome tool that should be added to our list? Our Twitter DMs are open. Let us know!

Find Herb Greenberg’s favourite stock research tools here.

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We’ve collected lists of the best financial research software in the following categories:

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